Raising Savannah

Tuesday

Tim Marshlick was only 15 years old when he started working for a local crane company and developed what would become a lifelong fascination with the tall, gangly machines.

"From the beginning, I just had to know everything there was about how they worked and what they could do," he said.

A quick learner, Marshlick was in management by the time he was 18.

In 1997, after 31 years with the same company, Marshlick decided to strike out on his own. He and a silent partner scraped up enough to get started and Tim's Crane & Rigging was born.

It was rough going in the beginning.

"The first four years consisted of 14-hour days, seven days a week," Marshlick said. "But gradually, it began to pay off."

Since then, Marshlick has grown Tim's Crane into a multimillion dollar business with a hand in almost 80 percent of the superstructures that have sprouted in and around Savannah in the past decade.

From big, early projects like the Savannah International Trade & Convention Center and its next-door neighbor, the Westin Savannah Harbor, to the more recent Ellis Square project and The Kessler Collection's Bohemian Hotel, a nine-story luxury hotel currently under construction on River Street, "whatever it takes to lift something, we do," Marshlick said.

In between the big signature jobs, Tim and Co. have tackled almost every kind of lift imaginable - from setting up concrete silos to working train wrecks, from putting the cupola on top of Savannah City Hall to setting a massive, circa 1891, steeple bell in the garden at Independent Presbyterian Church.

"We've done a lot of lifts at the ports - everything from big yachts to a vaporizer for the LNG facility at Elba Island," he said.

They also helped lift the first wave of Kia automaking equipment (all 3,500 tons of it) off ships in October. But not all of their work is industrial.

"We've lifted delicate statues out of the pool at the Ford Plantation in Richmond Hill and moved huge, full-grown oak trees for transplanting," he said.

"Last week, we bid a job setting 10,000-pound targets on the tank range at Fort Stewart."

Probably the toughest job the company has faced in a long time was its role in the recovery efforts following the explosion and fire at Imperial Sugar earlier this year.

"We used personnel baskets attached to a crane to lower emergency workers into the rubble to search for victims," Marshlick said. "That was really hard emotionally for everyone."

Today, Marshlick and his original partner, Dozier Cook, have an inventory of 25 cranes capable of lifting from 15 tons to 250 tons, with booms that can reach 350 feet into the sky.

Their 30 operators are spread out all over the Coastal Empire and beyond, with jobs that can last from three hours to three weeks to a year or more. All Tim's operators have been trained to work disasters and emergencies, and he is particularly proud of the company's safety record.

"All of our folks are fully aware of OSHA regulations and operator requirements," he said.

He's also proud of the family atmosphere he's fostered.

"I've always believed that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of you," he said. "That philosophy hasn't let me down yet."

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